Guest:

Chang-Rae Lee, author of the novels “Native Speaker,” “A Gesture Life,” and “Aloft.” He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. His new novel is “The Surrendered.”

Timothy Leary addresses the crowd at the "Human Be-In," which he helped organize, in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park on Jan. 14, 1967. Leary told the crowd to "Turn on, Tune in and Drop out." (AP)

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Half a century ago this year — fall 1960 — psychologist Timothy Leary ate psilocybin mushrooms in Mexico and had what he would call “the deepest religious experience” of his life.

He came home to promote psychedelics as the path to revelation, revolution. Richard Nixon called him the most dangerous man in America. Much of the 1960s danced to his tune.

My guest today tells the remarkable story of how a tiny band of seekers and psychic explorers ended up changing the culture of a nation, and its very understanding of mind, body and spirit.

This hour, On Point: The psychedelic roots of New Age America.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Don Lattin covered religion for the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades and is author of “Following Our Bliss: How the Spiritual Ideals of the Sixties Shape Our Lives Today.” His new book is “The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America.”

Childbirth isn’t anything new, of course. It’s been around for as long as we have. What has changed is our response to it.

Medical procedures are constantly adapting and attitudes are always in flux. From midwives and home births to male doctors and hospitals, from no drugs to drugs, to our modern-day smorgasbord of birthing options, there’s always some new thing.

But how far have we really come, and what have we learned? Doctor and journalist Randi Hutter Epstein has written the book on it.

This hour, On Point: Childbirth through the ages.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Tom Ashbrook is on vacation this week.

Guest:

Randi Hutter Epstein joins us from New York.  A medical journalist and trained doctor, she’s written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications. Her new book is “Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank.”

Read an excerpt from “Get Me Out” at NPR.org.

(Cover photo by Hiroji Kubota/Magnum)

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North Korea is the world’s black hole. A country of goose-stepping soldiers, nuclear ambitions and famine. Kim Jong-Il, the Dear Leader, has failed his people in unforgiveable ways.

But the story has been muffled. He has shut out the media and sealed the country’s borders.

In an unforgettable new book, the Los Angeles Times’ Barbara Demick has pieced together the accounts of those who escaped to paint a deeply disturbing portrait of North Korea — and of the challenges defectors face once they leave.

This hour, On Point: life inside North Korea.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Tom Ashbrook is on vacation this week.

Guest:

Barbara Demick, Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. Her new book is “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.”

Read an excerpt from “Nothing to Envy” at RandomHouse.com. And see photos and video at the book’s website.

You can also hear a New Yorker magazine podcast with Barbara Demick.

It began as a simple father-son bedtime story.

A son with dyslexia and ADHD. A father who piqued his interest in reading with tales of ancient Greek myths. Night after night.

Until, at last, Rick Riordan ran out of myths to tell his son. Time came for him to invent his own — and so Percy Jackson & the Olympians was born.

Now it’s a bestselling children’s series and a new Hollywood movie. And there’s a whole new series in the works.

This hour, On Point: author Rick Riordan on Percy Jackson & the Olympians.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Tom Ashbrook is on vacation this week.

Guest: 

Rick Riordan, best-selling author of the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series for children and the Tres Navarre mystery series for adults. Until 2005, he taught English and history at public and private middle schools in California and in Texas. On May 4th his new book, “The Red Pyramid,” will be released. It’s the first in a new Egyptian mythology series called ‘”The Kane Chronicles.” And in September another new series will begin, this series based off Percy Jackson & The Olympians.

Read an excerpt from Rick Riordan’s new book, “The Red Pyramid.”

In the Great Depression, it was Steinbeck capturing the pain. In the “greed is good” 80s, it was Tom Wolfe with “Bonfire of the Vanities” capturing the greed.

In this time — our time of Enron and Madoff and bonus billions and bailout — we’ve been waiting for the author, the fiction, to show us what we’ve been up to. Or down to.

Adam Haslett’s new “Union Atlantic” is a start. Bankers acting badly. Old morals and principles, rolled over. Super McMansions and high drama in the vaults of the Federal Reserve.

This hour, On Point: reading our grandly grubby times in Adam Haslett’s “Union Atlantic.”

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us first from Washington is David Kirkpatrick, reporter for The New York Times covering money and politics.

Adam Haslett joins us from New York.  Author of the new novel “Union Atlantic,” his collection of short stories, “You Are Not a Stranger Here,” was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award and the 2003 Pulitzer Prize.

Read an excerpt from “Union Atlantic” at Esquire.com.

And from Hanover, N.H., we’re joined by Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic. He’s the author of  “Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900,″  a thematic history of the Gilded Age, and editor of the anthology “Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America.”

To the outside world, contemporary China can look like a baffling whirlwind of hyper-growth and change these days.

From the inside, for ordinary Chinese, says my guest today, it can look much the same.

New Yorker magazine writer Peter Hessler wrote “River Town” and “Oracle Bones,” great works on modern China. Now he’s hit the road in China, going deep into vast and intimate landscapes that are being transformed overnight. Into the Chinese race to keep up with their own wild economic evolution.

This hour, On Point: Peter Hessler on life in the China boom.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Peter Hessler joins us from New York. He’s a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the books “Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present” and “River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze.”  His new book is “Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory.” 

Read an excerpt from “Country Driving.”

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South Carolina governor Mark Sanford liked to quote scripture about “goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” 

But out of sight he was ditching his family and deep in a steamy affair with an Argentine lover. Jenny Sanford watched it all unfold. 

And when the governor’s story of hiking on the Appalachian Trail all fell apart, the state’s First Lady was not standing at his side as the wronged and dutiful political wife. 

She was packing. She was strong, and gone.  

This Hour, On Point: South Carolina First Lady Jenny Sanford, on staying true to more than a wayward man.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Jenny Sanford, first lady of South Carolina. She’s the author of the new memoir, “Staying True.” Read an excerpt.

(AP Photo/V-Day)

Eve Ensler performed a couple of monologues from her new book “I am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World“ in our second hour on Wednesday.

We got a very big response – both over the phones and online – so we thought we’d pull out the two readings and offer them here for your listening pleasure (and your reactions).

Here’s the monologue “You Tell Me How To Be a Girl in 2010″:

And here’s the book’s title monologue, “I Am an Emotional Creature“:

What do you think?  You can listen to the full interview — and see the range of online comments — here.

In this photo released by V-Day, Eve Ensler is joined by two women outside Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, eastern Congo. The hospital sees about 3,500 women a year suffering fistula and other severe genital injuries, victims of what a U.N. expert called the worst violence against women in the world. (AP)

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Eve Ensler made the language of female anatomy an open book in “The Vagina Monologues.”

A decade and more on, her one-woman play has morphed into a rallying point against victimization of women worldwide.

Now, Ensler is turning her attention to girls. In her new book, “I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World,” she animates stories of girls abused, trafficked, mutilated, locked up in Facebook and lost.

And she champions girl power — which could and should, she says, save the world.

This hour, On Point: Eve Ensler on girls.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Eve Ensler joins us from New York. Performer, activist, and Obie-winning playwright, she’s best known for “The Vagina Monologues.” Her new book is “I am an Emotional Creature: the Secret Life of Girls Around the World.” You can read an excerpt here. She is also founder of the group V-Day, which works to end violence against women and girls across the globe.

Everybody knows a hypochondriac, obsessed with health and illness. Few admit to being one.

But history is littered with great thinkers and artists who were morbidly obsessed with dysfunction and disease. Moliere, Kant, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Mann all wrote of the syndrome. Charles Darwin, Andy Warhol, Charlotte Bronte, Glenn Gould all had it. Maybe Michael Jackson and Woody Allen, too.

In the era of the “worried well,” we may all have a touch. This hour, On Point: illness, imagination, and tales of the eminent hypochondriacs.

Plus, later this hour, we’ll remember the people’s historian, Howard Zinn.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Joining us from Tunbridge Wells, England, is Brian Dillon, author of “The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives.” Dillon’s first book, “In the Dark Room,” won the 2006 Irish Book Award for nonfiction. He is UK Editor for Cabinet, an arts and culture quarterly, and a research fellow at the University of Kent.

Read an excerpt from “The Hypochondriacs.”

Remembering Howard Zinn

Later this hour, we look back at groundbreaking American historian Howard Zinn, dead at 87. Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States,” died of a heart attack yesterday in Santa Monica, California. An icon of the left, he turned the standard American historical narrative on its head — elevating the voices of workers, feminists, and war protesters. 

Joining us from Princeton, New Jersey, is Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He’s the author most recently of “Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security — From World War II to the War on Terrorism.” 

Zinn had twice been a guest on our show. In 2002, he discussed the war on terror in its early days.  And in 2006, as war raged on in Iraq, Zinn joined us to discuss the futility of war.

Salman Ahmad is a bonafide rock star in Pakistan, across South Asia and in émigré communities around the world.

As a Pakistani Muslim boy, he caught Led Zeppelin fever in America, came home with a dream of fusion rock-and-roll and world peace — and now argues with mullahs over whether Islam even permits music.

He’s been banned in Pakistan, gone nose-to-nose with the Taliban, been thronged by screaming fans, and now wants to bridge East and West. But it’s tough.

This hour, On Point: a Muslim rocker stands up for peace.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Salman Ahmad joins us from New York. He’s the co-founder and guitarist for the Pakistani rock band Junoon, which The New York Times has called “the U2 of Pakistan.”  Salman’s new book is “Rock & Roll Jihad: A Muslim Rock Star’s Revolution.”  You can read an excerpt here.

More links:

Here’s the video of the Junoon song “Ehtesaab,” which was banned in Pakistan:

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Jaron Lanier was there in the morning of the digital age, when everything was thrilling and new. He was a thinker and an artist and a programmer turned on by the Internet revolution.

Now, he’s not so sure. What looked liberating may be enslaving us, he says, to a kind of aggregated, collectivist “hive mind” online.

“Digital Maoism,” he’s called it, making digital peasants out of Googlers and Facebookers. Stealing individuality. Reducing us to mush.

Ouch!

This hour, On Point: a warning on the web.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Jaron Lanier joins us in our studio. A computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author, he’s a pioneer of “virtual reality,” and was a founding contributing editor of Wired magazine. His new book is “You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto.”  You’ll find related materials on his website, and you can read an excerpt here.

Also in our studio is David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He is a co-author of the 2000 bestseller “The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual.” More recent books include “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” and “Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder.”

Closing segment: Earthquake in Haiti

Later this hour, we turn to the situation in Haiti following the devastating earthquake there yesterday:

Joining us from Miami is Carol Rosenberg, foreign correspondent for The Miami Herald. She’s part of the team that’s been reporting on the earthquake since news of it first broke yesterday afternoon.  You can follow their latest coverage here. 

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Noni Carter is eighteen years old — smart, black, American — and telling a story hundreds of years old. The story of African-American slavery.

Alex Haley told it in “Roots.” Toni Morrison in “Beloved.” Steven Spielberg put it on the screen in “Amistad.” Now a new generation is stepping up with its own take on slave days.

Freedom must be more than escaping a whip and crossing a river, writes Carter, in her new slave narrative, “Good Fortune.”

This hour, On Point: eighteen-year-old Noni Carter, and a new generation, look back on slavery.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Noni Carter joins us from Atlanta. She is a freshman at Harvard University and author of the new novel for young adults, “Good Fortune.”

From New York we’re joined by Pamela Newkirk, associate professor of journalism at New York University and editor of the volume “Letters from Black America.” Her previous books are “Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media” and “A Love No Less: More Than Two Centuries of African American Love Letters.”

Every year, ideas impresario John Brockman asks one hundred super-bright minds one big question, and shares their answers with the world.

This time out, the question was about science and what big development in our lifetimes will change the world. What will change everything?

The answers — from Craig Venter, Richard Dawkins, Lisa Randall, Irene Pepperberg, and many more — range from mind-reading to space elevators to cross-species breeding. Yikes.

This hour, On Point: “This will change everything…”

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

John Brockman joins us from New York. He’s the founder of the Edge Foundation, which runs the science and technology website Edge.org. Every year, Edge asks scientists and thinkers a “big question,” and publishes the answers in a book, which Brockman edits. The latest, just out, is “This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future.” It’s based on the 2009 question: “What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?” The 2010 question, “How is the internet changing the way you think?,” has just been posted.

From Cambridge, Mass., we’re joined by Frank Wilczek, Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist and professor of physics at MIT. His response to the 2009 Edge question discusses coming technological advances resulting from deeper understanding of quantum physics. He’s the author of several books on physics for the lay reader, most recently “The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces.” 

And from Berkeley, Calif., we’re joined by Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at UC-Berkeley and an expert on cognitive and language development. Her response to the 2009 Edge question discusses the extension of human childhood.  Her latest book is “The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life.”

We’re in a century that biologists fear will bring a “great extinction.” Half of all species on Earth, gone, by this century’s end. Wildlife populations cut so deeply that the process of evolution itself could be stopped.

But around the world, committed conservationists are girding to battle that on a scale and with a vision bigger than ever before. They call it “rewilding.” Bringing back and reconnecting swaths of wild Earth and animals on a grand scale.

Our guest, Caroline Fraser, has been out tracking their progress.

This hour, On Point: on the front lines of “rewilding” the Earth.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Caroline Fraser joins us from Santa Fe, New Mexico. She’s the author of “Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution.”  For the past several years, she’s traveled all seven continents reporting on large-scale and transborder conservation projects. 

Read an excerpt (pdf) from “Rewilding the World.”

Joining us from Albany, Australia, is Keith Bradby, coordinator of Gondwana Link, a rewilding project that aims to protect a large swath of land in southwest Australia – from the wet karri forests of the far south west to the woodlands bordering the Nullarbor Plain.

More links: 

See a slideshow of Caroline’s photos from the conservation frontlines at Scientific American.

Connect with conservation organizations that work on “rewilding.”

On Saturday, an apparent double agent for Al Qaeda killed seven CIA officers in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan. On Sunday, a U.S. drone flattened a militant hideout in neighboring Pakistan’s Al Qaeda stronghold.

It looked like a blow-for-blow exchange. But the U.S. blows came by remote control. By robotic warfare.

P.W. Singer says robots — on the ground, in the air — are taking the United States into undeclared war. Remote control war. War with very new parameters and implications. He’s with us today.

This hour, On Point: P.W. Singer on the relentless march of robots into war.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

P.W. Singer joins us from Washington. He’s senior fellow and director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at Brookings. His most recent book, just out in paperback, is “Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.” His previous books include “Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry” and “Children at War.” He served as coordinator for Barack Obama’s defense policy task force during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Read an excerpt from “Wired for War” at Singer’s website.

More links:

On our Notes & Updates blog, we take a look at several videos of U.S. drones and war-bots, like the MQ-9 Reaper, shown here:

Read the post and see more videos.

It’s the season of giving — and that’s lasted for a reason. First, there’s need. Second, giving makes us feel better. Live better.

Cami Walker found that out the hard way. At 32, just a month after her wedding, she was diagnosed with painful multiple sclerosis. Nothing made her feel better.

Until, from the depth of her pain, she started giving to others. Just little things at first. Then more. For twenty-nine straight days.

And the giving, she says, brought her back. Science says she may be right.

This hour, On Point: in the season of giving, the power of the gift.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Los Angeles is writer Cami Walker. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2006. Her new book is called “29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life.” She is the creator of the online community 29-Day Giving Challenge.

Read an excerpt from “29 Gifts.”

With us in our studio is Patricia Rogers, a psychotherapist in private practice. She’s counseled individuals, couples and families for over 20 years.

And joining us from Stony Brook, New York, is Stephen Post. He is director for the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at Stony Brook University. He co-authored the book “Why Good Things Happen to Good People.”

Charles Dickens is back on the big screen again this season, with a Jim Carrey 3-D version of “A Christmas Carol.” Bah humbug, Tiny Tim, and all the rest.

And that’s not the only Dickensian comeback this year. Poverty’s back, too — a staple of the man who knew and drew the poorhouse like no one else in English literature.

Charles Dickens’ own father was imprisoned for debt. Young Dickens, sent into the boot-black factory to work at twelve. He never got over it.

A new biography tells all. This hour, On Point: Dickens master Michael Slater on the life and prodigious work of Charles Dickens.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Michael Slater is emeritus professor of Victorian literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. He’s the past president of both the International Dickens Fellowship and the Dickens Society of America, and former editor of the journal The Dickensian. His acclaimed new biography is “Charles Dickens.” Read an excerpt (pdf).

Look into the original manuscript for “A Christmas Carol” (NY Times).

Alexander McCall Smith was born in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, has lived for years in Scotland, and made his name around the world with tales of “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency,” set in a fictional Botswana.

His stories bring Africa to life with strong women, charming humanity, and a strong whiff of longing for simpler values, places and times.

Now, McCall Smith brings us a war story, from the English sidelines of World War II, where music carries humanity through.

This hour, On Point: Alexander McCall Smith on life, Africa, music, and war.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Alexander McCall Smith, bestselling author of more than 60 books and creator of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. His new book is “La’s Orchestra Saves the World.” McCall Smith is Professor Emeritus of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh. He is also an amateur bassoon player and co-founder of The Really Terrible Orchestra.